The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  British and American support ships were diverted to Sevastopol when it was found that Yalta’s coastal waters remained clogged with German mines. (“They didn’t leave a map,” a Russian officer explained with a shrug.) From the ships’ holds, office furniture, two hundred tons of radio equipment, and all that tipple aboard Franconia was trucked for fifty miles—and nine hundred hairpin turns—across the mountains. A “sanitary survey,” conducted in Yalta on January 28 by U.S. Navy physicians, found a “marked infestation with bed bugs”; hundreds of mattresses and pillows were sprayed with a 10 percent solution of DDT dissolved in kerosene. Linens were dusted with DDT powder and, for good measure, Russian kitchen staffs received instruction in “hygienic practices.”

  Four Soviet regiments arrived to safeguard Yalta, in addition to 160 fighter planes, several antiaircraft batteries, and Stalin’s security cordon of 620 men, reinforced by a personal bodyguard of a dozen Georgians carrying tommy guns. Seventy-four thousand security checks were made within a twenty-kilometer diameter of the town, and 835 suspected “anti-Soviet elements” arrested. Three concentric circles of sentries ringed the Soviet, British, and American compounds, and the woods grew stiff with shadowy agents. Eavesdroppers with listening bugs and directional microphones also arrived from Moscow, intent on overhearing as many private conversations as possible.

  Despite the efforts of all those Soviet maids and maîtres d’s, ARGONAUT would be more rough-hewn than earlier conclaves in venues like Casablanca, Quebec, and Washington. “Regret necessity for nineteen full colonels sleeping one room,” a terse message to the British delegation warned. Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay, the prime minister’s military assistant, later wrote, “It would have been difficult to find a more unget-at-able, inconvenient, or unsuitable meeting place.”

  Yet apprehension ran far deeper than concerns over crowded quarters and bed bugs. “This may well be a fateful conference,” Churchill had told Roosevelt. “The end of this war may well prove to be more disappointing than was the last.” ARGONAUT would help shape the postwar world. Now all that remained was for the Argonauts themselves to arrive.

  Sacred Cow touched down at 12:10 P.M. on Saturday at Saki airfield on the Crimean west coast, followed twenty minutes later by the prime minister’s upholstered Skymaster. Wearing his cape and a gray fedora with the brim turned up, Roosevelt descended in the caged elevator to the icy runway, where a Secret Service agent lifted him into a Russian jeep. He was greeted by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, known privately to the Americans as “Stone Ass.” With Churchill standing at his elbow smoking a cigar, the president took the salute of a high-stepping, white-gloved honor guard from whose rifles live ammunition had been confiscated. All twenty-five planes from Mission No. 17 stood in perfect alignment as the captain of the guard marched past holding a sword “straight in front of him like a great icicle,” wrote Charles Moran. A band crashed through three national anthems and then the “Internationale.”

  We will destroy this world of violence,

  Down to the foundations, and then

  We will build our new world.

  He who was nothing will become everything.

  “The president looked old and thin and drawn,” Moran added. “He sat looking straight ahead with his mouth open, as if he were not taking things in.” Three large tents stood near the crude control tower. Tables inside were heaped with platters of salmon, sturgeon, whitefish, caviar, and black bread. Beside steaming glasses of tea stood pitchers of vodka, as well as bottles of cognac and champagne. Marshall, muffled in a fur-lined khaki overcoat, glanced disapprovingly at this repast and muttered, “Let’s get going.”

  Soon a weaving convoy of sedans and buses followed the unpaved road to Yalta, eighty miles and five hours away. No photograph or Movietone footage could have more vividly conveyed to the Western Allies the intensity of the war being waged by their eastern comrades: mile upon mile of gutted buildings, barns, crofts, trains, tanks, trucks. Peasant women in shawls and knee boots waved from barren fields and from orchards reduced to flinders. Except for a few sheep, no livestock could be seen, or farm machinery, or men for that matter, apart from the sentries in greatcoats and astrakhan hats, one every hundred yards, saluting each passing vehicle with an abrupt extension of their rifles at a thirty-degree angle. Churchill passed the time by reciting Lord Byron’s epic poem Don Juan. Beyond bleak Simferopol, the terrain lifted from snowy moor to mountain. The Route Romanoff followed a high, winding trace around the limestone flank of Roman-Kosh, the highest peak in the Crimea, before descending to the serpentine coastal road above the sea, each mile warmer than the mile before, until shortly before six P.M. they came to Yalta. Female traffic wardens waved them through with a waggle of red and yellow flags.

  Churchill and the British contingent peeled away for their assigned billets in the Villa Vorontsov, described by Ismay as “a fantastic mixture of bogus Scottish castle and Moorish palace”; its furnishings, another guest said, radiated “an almost terrifying hideosity.” Built for a Russian governor in the early nineteenth century, with a handsome view of the Black Sea, the estate had served as a headquarters for Field Marshal Erich von Manstein during the Germans’ Crimean offensive. Great logs now burned in the hearths, and Russian housekeepers in black livery scurried about in an effort to accommodate the visitors. When Sarah Churchill mentioned that caviar was improved by lemon juice, a tub holding a lemon tree heavy with fruit appeared in the foyer. When Air Marshal Portal noted that a large glass tank lacked fish, goldfish swam on the instant.

  Alas, Moran complained, “nothing is left out but cleanliness.” Bedbugs soon brought American fumigators with their DDT sprayers—too late for Churchill’s badly gnawed feet, although a bigger, bug-free bed was shipped by special train from Moscow. Generals and admirals now shared cells built for serfs—“We sleep in droves like prep school boys in dormitories,” one officer wrote his wife—and just two bathrooms with cold taps served the entire villa. Sarah wrote her mother of seeing “3 field marshals queuing for a bucket” to relieve themselves. Yalta, the prime minister would harrumph, was surely “the Riviera of Hades.” Perhaps only Brooke was happy: “I picked up a great northern diver, scoters, cormorants, many gulls and other diving ducks,” he told his diary. “Also dolphins feeding on shoals of fish.”

  Ten miles away the Americans settled into the fifty-room Villa Livadia, a two-story, flat-roofed palace of limestone and marble set on a sea bluff. Suitcases and musette bags were piled in the grand foyer, as the travelers arrived to be greeted by servants who bowed at the waist and addressed Roosevelt as “Your Excellency.” (“The president did not seem displeased,” one general noted.) Here too the guests found an odd mixture of elegance and inconvenience. Waiters in swallowtail coats carried silver trays with little cakes and scalding tea in tall glasses, and caviar hillocks seemed to rise from every oak table. In a makeshift salon, a Russian barber and manicurist stood ready to groom the Americans, and the lush grounds around Livadia offered fifteen kilometers of walking paths lined with cedars, yews, and black cypresses shaped like exclamation points. Yet only four bathtubs and nine lavatories served more than one hundred Americans living on two floors in the villa; cards thumbtacked to the doors listed bathroom assignments by age, rank, and sex. (The president’s daughter, Anna, was one of two women in the traveling party.) For the impatient, auxiliary latrines were dug in a nearby deer park. A notice to all delegates asked, “Please do not pilfer rooms and dining services for souvenirs.”

  An air of tragedy hung over Livadia, which had been built in 1911 as a summer palace for the last czar, Nicholas II, and his czarina, Alexandra, at a cost of two million rubles, paid in gold. Orthodox priests had spattered holy water and swung smoldering censers to bless each room. Little imagination was required to see the royal couple with their four daughters and ailing son arriving by imperial train from St. Petersburg, snacking on reindeer tongue and smoked herring as they cavorted through the villa or aboard th
e three-masted, twin-funneled royal yacht anchored below the bluff. It was said that lion-head embellishments on the marble benches outside the front entrance caricatured the czar; that he slept in a different room every night to foil assassins; that a private outside staircase had been used by the mystical Rasputin to visit the czarina. After abdicating in 1917, Nicholas futilely petitioned to retire at Livadia; instead, he and his family were murdered, and the villa became first a tuberculosis asylum and then a German division headquarters in 1941. Hitler had promised the estate to Rundstedt after the war for services rendered, and thus it escaped the torch.

  Now Roosevelt slept in the czar’s first-floor suite, whose décor was described as “early Pullman car,” with brass lamps shaded in fringed orange silk and bottle-green harem cushions scattered across the floor. Marshall was assigned another royal bedroom upstairs, and Admiral King, to the great mirth of his comrades, occupied the czarina’s boudoir.

  * * *

  At four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the heavy wooden doors flew open and a Secret Service squad marched into the Livadia foyer, followed by a Soviet security phalanx at port arms. From a black Packard in the semicircular driveway emerged a short ursine figure in a round military cap and a greatcoat adorned with epaulets and six brass buttons. His trousers were tucked into boots of soft Caucasus leather with elevated heels, and on the khaki tunic of his marshal’s uniform he wore the red ribbon and five-pointed star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. The impenetrable dark eyes and gray pushbroom mustache were softened by a slight smile that revealed irregular teeth, more black than bone in tint, and even the fading light showed that beneath a heavy coating of talcum powder his cheeks were dimpled with the smallpox scars he had incurred at age six. All conversation stopped—Russian servants were careful not to rattle the teacups—and junior officers pressed forward, necks craned, as if to catch a fleeting glimpse of Grendel.

  Joseph Stalin intrigued even Franklin Roosevelt, who now greeted the marshal with a broad grin and an extended hand from behind the desk of his makeshift study in the palace. They shared native shrewdness, political acumen, and a conviction that their respective nations were about to become superpowers—a recent coinage that they would help define. In other respects the wealthy patrician had little in common with this son of a drunk cobbler and a mother born into serfdom. Roosevelt a few weeks later would tell his cabinet, preposterously, that during Stalin’s youthful study for the priesthood “something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave”; in fact, he had left the seminary to specialize in bank robbery, extortion, and—as the first editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda—manipulation of the masses. Calm, laconic, and often courteous, with, in Brooke’s estimation, “a military brain of the highest caliber,” he was also vindictive, enigmatic, and a murderer to rival Hitler. Still, Roosevelt repeatedly told his lieutenants, “I can handle Stalin.” As for the marshal’s perspective: he had observed a few months earlier that “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket of a kopeck.… Roosevelt is not like that. He dips his hand only for bigger coins.”

  Beneath a painting of a farmer plowing his field and a chandelier with bulbs of varying size and brilliance, they made small talk. The president was pleased they could have a private conversation before Churchill joined them. Stalin spoke a few snatches of English, perhaps learned from Hollywood movies, notably, “You said it!,” “So what?,” and “What the hell goes on around here?” With Bohlen translating and taking notes, Roosevelt assured the marshal that he was “living in comfort” at Livadia, where all plenary sessions would convene for the president’s convenience. He observed that Allied military fortunes had “considerably improved” since their last meeting, in Teheran fourteen months earlier. With armies from east and west now edging closer, he hoped that General Eisenhower would be able to communicate directly with Soviet field commanders rather than routing all messages through the Combined Chiefs. The shocking pillage of Crimea made him “more bloodthirsty than a year ago,” the president added, and he urged Stalin to consider offering a dinner toast “to the execution of fifty thousand officers of the German army.”

  The marshal replied that the carnage was much worse farther north in Ukraine; there the enemy’s Lebensraum plan to settle ten million German colonists in the east had resulted in genocide. Everyone had become more bloody-minded, he said, for the Germans were “savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings.”

  Roosevelt offered Stalin a cigarette and lighted another for himself. The British, he said, were “a peculiar people and wished to have their cake and eat it too.” As for the French, he wholeheartedly agreed with Churchill’s tart rationale for excluding De Gaulle from ARGONAUT. (“I cannot think of anything more unpleasant and impossible,” Churchill had recently written Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, “than having this menacing and hostile man in our midst.”) Yet the president believed it might make sense for France to have a postwar occupation zone in Germany, along with the Big Three.

  Why, Stalin asked, given how little France had contributed to winning the war?

  “Only out of kindness,” Roosevelt replied.

  Stalin nodded. “That,” he said in his thick Georgian accent, “would be the only reason to give France a zone.”

  They parted with another handshake. Later, tamping tobacco into his pipe, the marshal gestured toward the ailing man in the wheelchair and mused aloud, “Why did nature have to punish him so?”

  * * *

  Upon Churchill’s arrival at 5:10 P.M., the first plenary session began with twenty-eight men convening in what had once been the Livadia state dining room. Half sat around a circular table covered in white damask and the rest perched on chairs along the walls. Measuring fifty by thirty feet, the chamber had double walnut doors at one end and a huge conical fireplace, now blazing merrily, at the other; half a dozen arched windows gave onto the garden. In this high-ceilinged room Nicholas and Alexandra in 1911 had celebrated the sixteenth birthday of their eldest daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, with a dress ball and a cotillion supper; as an autumn moon sailed above the Black Sea, the czar gave Olga a necklace of thirty-two diamonds and pearls. It was said that even in November the scent of roses had perfumed the night.

  Much of ARGONAUT’s initial meeting was given over to reports from the front. Speaking without notes, General Marshall offered a concise summary of circumstances in the west. The German salient in the Ardennes had been eliminated, he said, and Eisenhower hoped to cross the Rhine in March. Montgomery was readying an offensive southeast toward the Rhine above Düsseldorf, supported by the U.S. Ninth Army, which would drive northeast toward the same objective. The Ruhr would then be enveloped rather than assaulted frontally. A supporting attack by Bradley’s army group would angle toward Frankfurt and beyond, with Devers’s army group shielding the right wing. Tens of thousands of tons of cargo now arrived every day in European ports—this even though more than sixty V-1s and V-2s had pummeled Antwerp just two days earlier. Allied bombing continued to batter the Reich, Marshall added: in less than a year German oil production had dwindled to 20 percent of its peak.

  The Soviet account, read by General of the Army Aleksei I. Antonov, was electrifying. The winter offensive launched east of Warsaw in mid-January had advanced three hundred miles in three weeks; the Germans evidently had expected Stalin to await better weather and so were caught out. Red Army troops outstripped even the ten to twelve miles a day their commanders had hoped for, and Soviet soldiers now stood on the Oder River, less than fifty miles from Berlin. Enemy forces in East Prussia had been cut off, with Soviet legions sweeping toward Stettin, Danzig, and Königsberg on the Baltic. Industrial Silesia had been overrun. Red Army political officers were nailing up signs with messages scrawled in diesel oil: “You are now in goddamn Germany.” Antonov estimated that forty-five German divisions already had been destroyed in the offensive.

  The Soviets curr
ently possessed a seven-to-one superiority over the Germans in tanks, eleven-to-one in infantry, twenty-to-one in artillery. Hitler had shifted reserves from the west, but many were diverted to Budapest, or to screen Vienna and the Hungarian oil fields. Stalin chimed in to say that on the central front in western Poland, Soviet divisions outnumbered German by 180 to 80. Neither he nor Antonov noted the liberation near Kraków a week earlier of Auschwitz, among the most heinous of Nazi concentration camps. Only a few thousand inmates had been found alive, but subsequent investigation would reveal the extermination of more than a million people, mostly Jews, and unspeakable medical experiments. The Germans had not had time to cart away seven tons of women’s hair shorn from victims, or 348,820 men’s suits and 836,515 dresses, neatly baled, or the pyramids of dentures and spectacles whose owners had been reduced to ash and smoke.

  “Our wishes,” Antonov said, “are to speed up the advance of the Allied troops on the Western front.” German defenses had congealed east of Berlin; although Eisenhower in Versailles was offering three-to-one odds that the Russians would enter the enemy capital by March 31, that proved optimistic. Many Soviet divisions had been pared to fewer than four thousand men, with shortages of air support and artillery ammunition. Bridgeheads on the Oder remained pinched. Rain, snow, and mud slowed the armies’ momentum, as did the need to shift supply lines from Russian rail gauges to narrower western European tracks. Enemy counterattacks threatened the flanks in East Pomerania. Antonov put Red Army casualties in the past three weeks at 400,000, almost quadruple U.S. losses in the Bulge. When Admiral King complimented Soviet valor, Stalin replied, “It takes a very brave man not to be a hero in the Russian army.”

  Valor, yes, but also iniquity. Soviet atrocities were now rampant in the east; they included the burning of villages, wanton murder, and mass rape in East Prussia, Silesia, and elsewhere. By late 1945, an estimated two million German women would be sexually assaulted by Red Army assailants, and that figure excluded Poles and liberated Soviet women who had been kidnapped by the Wehrmacht to Germany as slave laborers. In Königsberg, nurses would be dragged from operating tables to be gang raped. “Our men shoot the ones who try to save their children,” a Soviet officer said. German fathers executed their daughters to spare them further defilement, and raped women were nailed by their hands to the farm carts carrying away their families as part of the migration of 7.5 million Germans to the west over the next few months. “They are going to remember this march by our army over German territory for a long, long time,” a Russian soldier wrote his father. Of these things, nothing was said—not in the Livadia salon that day, nor at any point during ARGONAUT.